CATEGORIES

Police Scenario Training

Building Clearing

Building clearing is done for anything as simple as a building/home is found with a door open to an active shooter scenario. In an active shooter scenario they would eliminate that threat before clearing the building, as was the case in the Trolley Square shooting in 2007. Most of the time they are just dealing with simple building clearings to insure that no one is in the building.

Cuffing Techniques

I just always assumed the when someone was cuffed they were being arrested. That is not always the case. There is a difference between being detained and being arrested. In some circumstances the civilian is demonstrating behavior that could be a danger to the police officer or themselves. In those cases it is often better to put them in handcuffs for everyone’s safety. If the handcuffs are not attached to both hands they could become a weapon and put the police officer in more danger.

Case Scenarios

The police are called out for a wide variety of reasons. Depending on the situation it is either a civil matter and they cannot get involved or it may result in someone being arrested and taken to the jail. It is up to the jail to determine if they will be accepted into the jail or not. We went through a number of them and how each situation would be handled by the police.

Action v.s. Reaction

Someone doing an action is always faster then someone reacting to the action. A police officer is usually reacting to someone else’s action and are therefore always a few second behind. One way to protect themselves is to always stay 21 feet away or more from the person they are dealing with. Where they are behind on time they have the distance to help over compensate for that.

The officers doing this training were the same officers that did the routine traffic stop scenarios for the EVO class. I always enjoy their training. Each of us were given the opportunity in a practice scenario to go out on a call. In my case I was dealing with a person in the park who was sword practicing. In situations like this you do not know if there could be violence or not. The main thing they wanted us to experience was the stress response that is typical in situations like this. Your ability to hear changes under these acute stressful situations. A color would be spoken out loud on the side. The person participating in the scenario did not hear the color that was spoken outloud.

My Thought About Tonight

Each class I am learning something new about the dangers the police officers face every day they go to work. Often it is little things that I would not have considered before. If we want a good policing in our communities we have to be engaged with the police. As with all jobs there are sometimes “bad apples” but for the most part people do try to do their best. If the community is engaged with the police officers it strengthens those relationships and helps to weed out the “bad apples”. Also a lot of the people that police officers deal with on a day to day basis are criminals and the bad elements of society. A little bit of kindness will go a long way.